It’s been compared to Lego, and for obvious reason. The planned Phoneblok, the brainchild of inventor Dave Hakkens, is a cell phone that has snap-on options that allow you to custom design your own phone from the, well, phone blocks. Choose exactly the screen blok you want. Choose the quality of camera you want among a range of camera blocks by different manufacturers. Choose the size of battery you want. And so on. And if one block breaks, you can just replace that block, rather than the whole phone. Same for upgrading a component.
As the promo video (below) suggests, “Let’s say this is your phone, and you do everything in the cloud, why not replace your storage block for a bigger battery blok?”
Explains Hakkens, “Every day we throw away millions of electronic devices because they get old and become worn out. But usually it’s only one of the components that causes the problem. The rest of the device works fine but is needlessly thrown away, simply because electronic devices are not designed to last. This makes electronic waste one of the fastest growing waste streams in the world. And our phone is one of the biggest causes.”
Of course, Phoneblok doesn’t exist – yet. It’s in the planning stages. In fact, it is currently in the ThunderClap stage. (What is ThunderClap? It’s a crowdsourced “announcement” service. Imagine KickStarter only instead of everyone committing some money, instead they commit to make an announcement for you on their social media accounts – and they all share that message on their social media accounts at the same time.)
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Phonebloks currently has a staggering 648,628 people who are going to announce the demand for Phonebloks through their Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr accounts, which means, ThunderClap estimates, that potentially an incredible 246,263,326 may see the announcement (in other words, all of the social media friends and followers of the 648,628 people who are going to announce it).
The ThunderClap announcement, set to go out on October 29th at 10:00 will say:
“Show the world we want a phone worth keeping! #phonebloks http://thndr.it/12lPDsQ”
This is a really cunning concept – because suddenly nearly 700,000 Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr accounts will all tell all of their friends to go to the Phonebloks website, and it will look like everyone in the world knows about it – people who see the announcement seemingly everywhere will think that they are the only people in the world who don’t know about it, and will rush to see what all the fuss is about. Ingenious, Thunderclap, ingenious.
Anyways, back to Phonebloks.
You can join the Phonebloks Thunderclap here.
You can see the Phoneblok website here.
And you can watch the Phoneblok video right here:
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